Linux Mint tutorial part 5 - Linux applications

A good document viewer. Not as good as Foxit Reader but that is not available for Linux. If you find it to be slow, uncheck 'Use smooth scrolling' under Settings -> Configure Okular -> General -> Appearance. I recommend checking 'Open new files in tabs' in 'Program features'.

Qpdf Viewer

Not as feature-rich as Okular but is specifically made as a tabbed document viewer. It opens tabs where you left them. For me this is important since sometimes I need to open same datasheets daily and this saves time. Okular supports tabs but they are not open at startup but you can open the files from Recent documents instead.

Audio

Easy Effects

EassyEffects is among the first things I install on a fresh Linux installation. It allows you to control and improve the sound experience. On the left side you can add audio filters. Keep in mind that the order matters and they are applied from top to bottom. Filters can be disabled or deleted from the list by hovering on it then using the pop-up icons.

I'm not an expert in audio engineering so I cannot tell you how to configure each filter. You can search for tutorials online or just experiment with them. The most important is the Limiter that stops the audio level going over 0.0 dB that will cause audio distortion and that is the last filter in the chain.

Another filter that I keep enabled all the time is the Compressor. I use it for two purposes. One, it increases the overall volume. Without it my headphones don't get enough volume. The second reason is to keep the sounds roughly at the same level by lowering the loud parts and amplifying the quieter ones. I prefer this for movies but for some music genres you might want to keep it disabled. I set the Input for the Compressor to be -0.4 dB since from what I read somewhere it allows some headroom for next filters and prevents clipping.

For loudness equalization, there are other effects that could perform better for some audio sources such as music or ASMR. These are Loudness and Autogain.

Bass Enhancer (available with the Flatpack version), uses some fancy algorithms to improve the bass and is better that simply boosting the low frequencies in an equalizer.

Crystalizer can be used to add a little of dynamic range to songs that were overly compressed. The signal is split in multiple bands to which different intensities can be applied in order to alter the overall dynamic range.

You can find more in depth information about each effect here: https://wwmm.github.io/easyeffects/index.html#plugins.

Video Players

SMPlayer

SMPlayer is a free media player for Windows and Linux with built-in codecs that can play virtually all video and audio formats. It doesn't need any external codecs.

What I like about this player is that the interface is highly customizable. You can add literally every menu function as a button on the toolbar. The initial GUI skin is not for everyone but can be changed. I personally like the Mac Fusion style. You can play/pause a video by clicking anywhere on the video frame. Try to do that in VLC.

Changing the Interface

The SMPlayer interface can be customized under Preferences -> Interface. Here, set the GUI to Skinnable GUI then choose the Skin and Style.

If the Skinnable GUI is greyed out then you need to download the smplayer-skins bz2 file from https://www.smplayer.info/en/downloads then copy the contents of the themes folder to /usr/share/smplayer/themes. After restarting the player the Skinnable GUI should be selectable.

SMPlayer configuration

In Options -> Preferences -> General -> General, make sure the multimedia engine is mpv which is the newer one.

In Options -> Preferences -> General -> Video, change output driver to gpu.

In Options -> Preferences -> Performance -> change Hardware decoding to nvdec. This is only the case if you have an NVidia graphics card. When the decoding is done by the graphics card, the CPU usage should be low.

Both cuda and vdpau have been depreciated and not actively developed. See here: https://mpv.io/manual/master/#options-hwdec.

Using nvdec, filters like flip, mirror, rotate won't work. SMPlayer video filters are applied in CPU and if GPU based hwdec is enabled, they will not work. Or you can have GPU based hwdec enabled but then copy back the decoded frame from GPU to CPU with "copy-back", then smplayer filters will work.

This holds true for all smplayer video filters like deinterlace, deblock, deband, flip, mirror, rotate etc.

Source: https://github.com/smplayer-dev/smplayer/discussions/778.

So if you need these filters you should use the nvdec-copy.

System Utilities

Linux Assistant

A Linux utility that can help beginners to set up automatic updates and snapshots, shows computer information and includes a search feature that shows the most searched items at the top.

Here is a video from it's creator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHcq-pBhfm8.

BleachBit

BleachBit is a free and open source tool that frees disk space and protects your privacy by deleting cache, cookies, logs, and other junk files. Can be installed from the Software Manager.

Stacer

Stacer is an open source system utility that helps users to manage system aspects, such as startup apps, system cleaner, services, processes, uninstaller, resources and APT. Can be installed from the Software Manager.

Disk Usage Analyzer

Disk Usage Analyzer is a graphical application to analyze disk usage. It can easily scan either the whole filesystem tree, or a specific user-requested directory.

Nemo Contains and Scroll

Opens the containing directory of a selected item in a new window and attempts to scroll to and highlight the item, enhancing the file navigation experience within the Nemo file manager.

Mouse

Btnx

btnx & btnx-config are mouse button mapper tools for mouse hardware typically from 2000s to 2015 (for newer mice support, we recommend Piper). btnx (Button Extension) is a daemon that enables rerouting of mouse button events through uinput as keyboard and other mouse button combinations.

As described on the project page, this software tool is mostly for older mice. But why would you use an older mouse? I have this old mouse from 2015:

No not that one, this one:

It is the SWOP-80 model from A4Tech. What I like about this mouse is the ergonomic shape and that the 4 buttons can be mapped to a custom function. For example I map the 2 buttons next to left and right click to copy/paste, and the other 2 mapped to back/forward that work in many applications not only in a web browser. I would like to buy a newer similar model but I couldn't find any. If you know one that has this 4 extra buttons, please leave it in the comments.

With older mice is difficult to make them work on Windows with the original drivers so I didn't had any hope it would work on Linux until I found this software that also solved the problem with the mouse wheel jumping and stuttering.

You need two pieces of software for this: btnx and btnx-config which is the graphical configuration tool for btnx. The installation might not look beginner-friendly but is not difficult. If you are not familiar with Github, to download the project files use the Code green button then Download Zip. After extracting btnx and btnx-config you should have two folders.

Installing btnx

First open the btnx folder and right-click on a white space and from the context menu select Open in Terminal to open a Terminal window with the current folder path.

Next install dependencies for Ubuntu or Debian:

sudo apt-get install libdaemon-dev libglade2-dev libgtk2.0-dev

Compiling:

./configure

make

Installing:

sudo make install

If at some point you wish to uninstall you can use:

sudo make uninstall

Installing btnx-config

Same as with btnx, open the btnx-config folder and right-click on a white space and from the context menu select Open in Terminal to open a Terminal window with the current folder path.

Next install dependencies for Ubuntu or Debian:

sudo apt install libdaemon-dev libglade2-dev libgtk2.0-dev

Compiling:

./configure

make

Installing:

sudo make install

If at some point you wish to uninstall you can use:

sudo make uninstall

Assuming you have successfully compiled and installed btnx and btnx-config, you can now configure your mouse-buttons. The application can be started from the Start menu using the search function or from the Terminal using sudo btnx-config.

Mapping mouse buttons

To add a mouse press New then give a name to the Configuration. Next press the Detect mouse & buttons.

After mouse detection, each button can be added and named.

Under the Buttons tab you can see the added buttons and map them to a function. In my case the two buttons near the left and right click, I named them left_aux and right_aux. Each of them has the keycode KEY_COPY and KEY_PASTE for copy/paste. The rest of them I left as default since they already worked before installing the software.

Tuesday, October 29, 2024